Meet The Cofounders Of The Berlin-Based Healthcare Startup That Just Raised €23.5 Million

In 2011, Swiss-born Clemens Raemy and German-born Katrin Alberding graduated in the same class at Harvard’s Business School. Though each of them took a separate route (Raemy cofounded and eventually sold an Uber-like app app for Latin America) and Alberding worked as a consultant and at various startups) eight years later they eventually decided to join forces for what they consider was a big problem in Germany: lack of nurses and caregivers.

“The culture is not that appealing and people are just worn out, it’s a very strenuous job, they wanna help people but they don’t get to do this because there’s a high level of bureaucracy and there’s a lot of shifts in the morning and the evening,” Alberding says. “So we founded the company on the basis of being a nurse-centric company so alleviate the pain of caregiving and and get back people to enjoy why they actually joined nursing, which is in order to help people.”

The two teamed up with third cofounder, Portuguese native Bruno Pires, and started a company called Kenbi, a care provider in Germany offering full range of professional care-services-at-home. In December of this year, Kenbi raised €23.5 million in a Series A round led by Endeavour Vision.

According to Raemy, because there’s such a huge shortage of nurses, there aren’t many available spots for care companies to take new patients. That’s why, he says, most patients spend time calling numerous different nursing companies and once they find one that actually has an available spot, they’re very happy they even found one and they choose to work with them.

“That’s the one part where we’re very different from the other companies and that’s because we grow so fast – we can offer available spots,” Raemy says. “Additionally, because of the many specializations that we have with our nurses we can also offer a complete package to the patients.”

Raemy says that starts with household help and goes as far to palliative care – which is care of diabetes, care with dementia, wound care etc.

“We have trained nurses in all these specialization areas, household related,” Raemy says. “Taking care of the patient from day 1 when they need some help in their lives until 70 years later when they need a lot of care in their lives.”

The way Kenbi generates revenue at the moment is by billing insurance companies (one is medical insurance and the other one is care insurance).

As far as numbers go, from November last year to November this year Kenbi’s growth was 3Xon revenue, 4x on the patient side, and 4x on the nurses side. At the moment, the Berlin-based company employs 340 people, of which 300 are nurses.

Alberding, who prior to cofounding the company, spent 6 months volunteering in Latin America and helping disabled people who didn’t have access to necessary equipment, says that one of Kenbi’s strongest points is its digitally savvy approach.

“Kenbi has eliminated the need for the nurses to meet in person on a lot of things because we’ve installed communication platform where you can be messaging in a safe way and you can exchange information,” Alberding says. “Instead of having to hand over files of patients by hand you now have it on your phone so there’s a lot more independence.”

Prior to raising the Series A, Kenbi had raised a cumulative pre-seed and seed round of €7 million, so long with the Series A, the current amount of equity financing in the company is just over €30 million.